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Each day since COVID-19 entered our lives has been accompanied by worrying, and wearying, lists of numbers: case counts, infection rates, tests administered, hospital admissions, deaths. The figures, dispassionate and detached, become a blur, and the importance of what lies behind them is increasingly forgotten. In a special obituary project, we will memorialize and recount the stories of just some of the nearly 400 names and faces behind COVID’s deathly toll in Ottawa.
At her friends’ encouragement, Marielle Gervais reluctantly agreed to go to the dance at a Missisquoi Beach resort south of Montreal that Friday night, although she was hardly in the mood.